David Secter's 1965 feature debut, Winter Kept Us Warm, was the first English-language Canadian film selected for Cannes, appearing at the 1966 edition of the festival at a time when francophone productions were starting to gain prominence in Canuck cinema. In the late 1950s/early 1960s, Direct Cinema had been established by the likes of Quebecers Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault (whose joint effort Pour la suite du monde was in fact the first Canadian feature to screen at Cannes), with a more commercial Québécois cinema subsequently developed by directors such as Denys Arcand, Denis Héroux and Gilles Carle.
Carle's first feature film, the magnificent comedy The Merry World of Léopold Z, debuted the same year as Winter Kept Us Warm, and while the latter is undoubtedly the lesser work, it is nevertheless an impressive achievement, and it's quite startling to see an English-language Canadian film taking this form. For Winter Kept Us Warm bears the influence of both Direct Cinema and the French New Wave, and, its recognisable Toronto milieu aside, its images are composed in a way that owes far more to the Québécois films of the period than it does to anything in the then-current anglophone cinema—Canadian or otherwise.
Taking its title from a phrase in Eliot's The Waste Land, Secter's brumal drama follows the friendship that develops between University of Toronto students Doug Harris (John Labow), a rather conceited senior, and Peter Saarinen (Henry Tarvainen), an introverted freshman of Finnish extraction, as the pair deal with academic life and their own changing emotions. Beautifully photographed by Robert Fresco and Ernest Meershoek, the film frequently hints at a deeper bond between Doug and Peter, often using their respective girlfriends Bev (Joy Fielding) and Sandra (Janet Amos) to cleverly illuminate the men's knotty relationship.
Given that it was made at a point when the National Film Board of Canada were handing out grants to countless film projects, it seems strange that Winter Kept Us Warm was funded mainly by its director. Secter's film is something of a minor gem, one with a fine sense of time and place, and it's a great pity that he never really built on its firm foundations. His follow-up picture, The Offering, made just one year later, fell foul of union regulations and never screened outside of Toronto, and a full decade passed before he resurfaced with two films in the same year—one a Troma movie, the other a skin flick that riffed on Shampoo.
Darren Arnold
Images: BFI
